The Best British Poetry 2012

The Best British Poetry 2012, ed. Sasha Dugdale (Salt)

If we are going to trust anyone to pick the best poems of the last 12 months, then Sasha Dugdale with Roddy Lumsden helping suit me very well.
However it isn't long before the introduction is bogged down in discussion of 'gender balance'. What a shame.
It is true that there was an imbalance, of perhaps 97% to 3% in favour of the male, throughout the canonical history of English poetry until quite recently. But Sasha seems to want it both ways here, congratulating herself on not even knowing who wrote the poems and unaware of their gender while also marking the slight majority of females in her selection.
Along with her championing of 'non-English' voices, which here includes Romani and Shetlandic, this anthology is still as determinedly politically correct as last year's and we won't be making progress towards the falling away of these barriers while we insist on letting them rule our thinking. Yes, the Poet Laureate, the Director of the Poetry Sociey and the editors of several of the most highly-respected poertry magazines are all female. And that's fine. Let it be.
Having never regularly bought the equivalent Forward book of the year's verse, I might start next year. Although Salt's selection is useful and brings to light a number of poems one hasn't seen (well, nearly all of them), it's hard not to wonder how many of them would have made one's own selection if time had been allowed to spend days and days in the Poetry Library. Quite possibly none of these poems will make my own shortlist, a mere handful, for Best Poem 2012.
That is not to say that Gillian Clarke's Swans isn't an excellent piece; Rory Waterman will be a first collection to look out for next year; Jane Flett is an unqualified success here; Graham Mort and Greta Stoddart are both picked for fine poems about the dead.
The longer I persevered with the poems, the more of them gradually revealed more than I had first found in them but afer a while it becomes subject to the law of diminshing returns and one suspects that one has found as much as is there for you. What I am most grateful for is that Vahni Capildeo's Four Departures from 'Wulf and Eadwacer'  sent me back to the original when quite possibly a female poet wrote the Best Poem of one of the years between perhaps 960 and 990.

The Shortlists - Best Poem and Best Collection 2011

I don't see many more things happening between now and Christmas that will affect this website's very sincerely considered but hopelessly disregarded awards for Best Poem and Best Poetry Collection of 2011. It's not as if I read everything and so such books as the Geoffrey Hill or Carol Ann Duffy were deselected without being given a fair chance, it has to be said.
We could add in further mentions for Best Event and Best Novel. In which case Tasmin Little's Naked Violin recital in Portsmouth in the summer wins a helluva classy affair for Best Event, holding on in a compelling battle with the Glyndebourne Rinaldo at the Proms and Natalie Clein's Cadogan Hall Prom as well as Muldoon, O'Brien and Harsent at Cheltenham. But one appeciates what a good year it must have been when The Tallis Scholars make the effort to come all the way down to a cultural outpost like Portsmouth and don't even get shortlisted for their trouble.
Julian Barnes would probably get the verdict over Hollinghurst for being a somehow better done job in the Novel but I also enjoyed the re-issue of Patrick Hamilton's Twopence Coloured and they could all be surpassed by Murakami's 1Q84, which I am halfway through as yet but does look like his best work and is proving most worthy of the time it is taking. 
But the real issue is the poetry and I'll leave you with the shortlists before returning with the answers some time later. There is no point including anything on the shortlist if they aren't potential winners and so I will keep the shortlists short. Only to say that Sasha Dugdale narrowly misses out on a place on the Best Collection list and so is compensated with a Best Poem contender.

Best Poem

Judy Brown, The Helicopter Visions
Sasha Dugdale, Plainer Sailing (Alzheimer's)
David Harsent, Ghosts
Martin Mooney, Dream of the Fisherman's Wife
Sean O'Brien, Elegy

Best Collection

David Harsent, Night
Roddy Lumsden, Terrific Melancholy
Martin Mooney, The Resurrection of the Body at Killysuggen

I'm fairly sure that the answers have finally been decided upon but I'll let it simmer for a while and if you come back next week the winners might have been announced by then.

Sasha Dugdale - Red House

Sasha Dugdale, Red House (Carcanet)

I'm not going to hazard a guess at the significance or symbolism of the red house in the title of this collection. It is a series of seven poems in the book and quick internet research suggests it is taken from a painting of 1932 by Kazimir Malevich. In the poems, a variety of vulnerable or dispossessed humanity and animals come and go, there are lines of rare music, like the vowel sounds in,

And the nestlings peep and pip at intervals, heard in rooms throughout

By the day-sick and the unfit for work

and one is aware of elsewheres whether spiritual, emotional or of geographical belonging.

I like poets who can do different things equally well, like Thom Gunn's ability to move between strict metre, syllabics and free verse. If Red House is not easy poetry, it is worth the effort, whereas in the same book, a poem like Prince's, nostalgic for a bygone way of life with the closing of a landmark shop, could hardly be more straightforward and yet is no less satisfying.

In Out of Town, a poem redolent of the waste land of Sean O'Brien and David Harsent's books this year, a derelict world is haunted by spirits, or are we them already, 'where no-man's-land might be an honest place.'

Beauty comes out of dross and horror can lie beneath beauty. In Dawn Chorus,

How they sing: as if each had pecked up a smouldering coal

Their throats singed and swollen with song

In dissonance as befits the dark world

Where only travellers and the sleepless belong

There is plenty more to like and admire. Shepherds, 'Perhaps Akhmatova was right', as well as poems responding to Keats, Auden and others. It is warmer and less desolate than other books this year that have inhabited similar territory and one could have done with more of it. I had thought that my shortlists for this year's best collections and poems were just about settled but I am reminded that it is only October and it isn't over until this gifted lady has sung.

The Best British Poetry 2011

The Best British Poetry 2011, edited by Roddy Lumsden (Salt)

You don't expect to find the most startling line of a poetry anthology in the introduction but here Roddy Lumsden advises us that,

around a quarter of the poets here are under 30, representing a coming generation that I believe to be the strongest ever in UK poetry

It's a lavish claim, not one that can be verified for a while yet and not one that all of us will necessarily be around long enough to see proven or otherwise. But, who can say. Maybe we are on the brink of the finest Golden Age that will outshine, say, the 1590's, 1820's or 1910's (and, please, add your own choice of generation in here, too).

This title has been welcomed as the overdue equivalent to a similar, long-established American one. Whether Britain needs everything that America has just because they have it is another thing one might wonder about. We got the credit crisis from them as well as gangsta rap. And, as Roddy readily anticipates, there are inevitable problems with proclaiming the 'best' and we shouldn't take that title too seriously. Whereas The Forward anthology picks out highlights from new books as well as magazines, this book is like an uber-magazine, not much more expensive that an issue of any one of them but selected from a wide range of them so someone like me who no longer has subscriptions to any can have a look at some recommended poems.

One never expects to like a very high percentage of poems in a magazine and so it's to this books credit that it contains a satisfactory quotient of things one is glad to have seen. While one can be confident that Ian Duhig and Sasha Dugdale are going to be worth having, I was pleasantly surprised by Deryn Rees-Jones and, a new name to me, Lizzi Thistlethwayte. Every poet has a biographical note that contains their own comments on their featured poem. These divide broadly equally, it seems, between those who appear to have had a very clear idea of exactly what their poem was going to do and those who only found out during its making or are perhaps not even quite sure yet.

For me the mystery goes on surrounding the industry darling, Ahren Warner, whose meta-narratives refer us through, here, a Baudelairean transaction within comparative linguistic approaches. It is clearly me that is the loser in having not the faintest idea of what it means or why it's so admired and my main regret is that I won't be anywhere in the vicinity when the time comes to register whether such poems take their place in the long and glorious history of poetry in English or are making their way sublimely into a cul-de-sac.

As so often, anthologies are unsatisfactory in being able to allow so few examples of each individual's work- and here it is only one each. The composite impression of poetry in 2011 is unfulfilling and half a dozen poems by much fewer poets would make a better book, with more chance of appreciating the talents that are in it, although would not meet Roddy's purpose. Which is why I think roughly the same amount of money spent on Sasha Dugdale's collection was the better spent.

I'm well aware that it is entirely my fault that far too much of this book passes me by but at least I tried, fed money into the machine, and I keep on trying while realizing that for me the real thrills of poetry are elsewhere.